Dr Vino's wine blog

wine talk that goes down easy

This excellent New Yorker article examines the phenomenon of measuring carbon emissions. The author, Michael Spector, mentions the study on the carbon footprint of wine that I wrote with Pablo Paster. And we were THIS close to a mention! Roll the tape:

Last year, a study of the carbon cost of the global wine trade found that it is actually more “green” for New Yorkers to drink wine from Bordeaux, which is shipped by sea, than wine from California, sent by truck. That is largely because shipping wine is mostly shipping glass. The study found that “the efficiencies of shipping drive a ‘green line’ all the way to Columbus, Ohio, the point where a wine from Bordeaux and Napa has the same carbon intensity.”

It’s good the research is getting out there! The WSJ blog Environmental Capital also mentioned it here and the New York based authors were delighted to raise a glass of Bordeaux to the finding. Foreign Policy also mentioned it in passing this time around but actually did mention it before.

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on Wednesday, February 20th, 2008 at 10:05 am and is filed under announcements, green wine.
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We are in the process of setting up a “Carbon Free’ shipping mechanism through http://www.carbonfund.org. As far as I am aware, this will make us the first company to ship wine ‘Carbon Free’ in the U.S. I will be adding an article to my blog in the next few days that will address the issue more specifically. This is a great program that enables shippers to offset their carbon emissions by purchasing offsets through Carbon Fund.

Thanks for your work, but I think you should address the new shipping CO2 revelations as soon as possible. If it really is 3x worse than previously believed, that warrants a re-calculation of your numbers, accordingly. Don’t you agree?
Thanks!

Actually, the New Yorker article preceded the U.N. leak about the 3x worse shipping CO2 reality, so it really does warrant a re-calculation of your numbers, to be honest. Furthermore, the claim that “you don’t have to build highways to berth a ship” is a crock of bad vinegar, because the ship building industry requires heavy use of trucks and highways to move (from source to port) the steel, wood, supplies, even fabric for your romantic but completely irrelevant sailboat, a fad of whisking wine from France to Ireland in “just” four days. And only 60,000 bottles at a time? Sure it’s a start, but seriously? There are supermarket chains with that much wine on pallets in the warehouse. It’s inconsequential in the grand scheme of things. Come on, Dr. V…. we have a long way to go, all fun and games aside, the shipment of heavy glass bottles via diesel barge across the Atlantic is hardly “sustainable” or laudable. We should all be open to swifter change. And given the groundbreaking news about the 3x greater impacts of oceanic freight than previously known, we need to take a deeper look at our vino’s venture from vineyard to corkage. (twistage? what is it now with these screw tops?) Sure, power plants and such need a larger kick in the pants, but every sector needs to rethink its impact.

You were mentioned quite a few times at the Global Climate Change and Wine conference, though not your blog. It was funny though having them talk of Tyler and for a second I thought, “huh, wonder who he is” then me and Gabriella turned to each other and mouthed “Dr.Vino!”
Glad to see your efforts getting talked about!